It’s been quiet in the garden this week. The plants are plugging along, trying to survive these last few days of extreme heat before the weather settles down into more average temps, at least for a while.
So, this week, instead of garden news, I’m going to recommend a book. I’ve been reading a lot on native plants and soil health and regenerative gardening, but there have been only a couple books that really brought all the issues around saving our natural world together for me so far.
Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard was one of them. I’ve mentioned this book by Douglas Tallamy a couple times already because it has the potential to have a huge impact on the way we look at the natural world and our approaches to trying to save it.
The great disconnect
The big takeaway from this book, for me at least, was that how we’ve been trying to save the natural world over the last hundred or so years has been mostly wrong, but if we changed our thinking a little bit, we could get it right.
The problem, Tallamy says, is that we’ve been making two big mistakes and still are:
1. We have assumed that people and nature can’t coexist.
In modern America, we live climate-controlled lives in air-conditioned boxes—houses, cars, stores, office buildings, giving us almost no reason to even go outside anymore, and when we do, it’s usually to a well-groomed and manicured park or soccer field. We may mow a lawn, but we’re just as likely to hire someone to look after it (looking at you, homeowners associations), if we have a lawn at all.
The result? Humans, or at least first-world humans, are disconnected from nature. It’s not a total surprise. We’ve viewed nature as an enemy for millennia, and for good reason. When nature is trying to kill you, blow down your house or crush the crops you need to survive, you tend to get a little defensive.
But this fear has carried over into the modern world. We still fear nature. Just look at all the nature’s-wrath programs on The Weather Channel. We try to avoid nature, or we try to force it into a mold of our making by manicuring our yards and trying to arrange the plants in our landscaping like furniture in a living room. Instead of going outside and learning about nature and how to live alongside it, our kids grow up completely disconnected from the planet they will have to manage some day, Tallamy says.
In Tallamy’s opinion, even our best efforts to save nature—our national parks—are wrong-headed because they isolate nature in widely separated pockets.
“By restricting conservation efforts to areas relatively unaffected by humans, we have condemned them to ultimate failure, because such areas are small in relation to the area required for successful conservation and they are isolated from one another” (p 36).
In other words, national parks are like snow globes: the landscape inside is perfectly preserved, but it’s too small to support the life forms that live there.
2. The second mistake: We left conservation to the conversationists.
“When we leave the responsibility of earth stewardship to a few experts (none of whom hold political office), the rest of us remain largely or entirely uninformed about what earth stewardship is, why we really need it, and how to practice it. Thus, few of us practice any form of stewardship toward the natural systems that support us.”
Nature’s Best Hope, page 36
Leaving an issue to the experts and policymakers, expecting them to fix it, Tallamy says, is a fast way to disconnect the rest of us from that issue. While the grownups in the room discuss the nitty gritty inside baseball details of the subject, the rest of us are forced to stand outside, waiting and watching, unable to do anything. Eventually, we lose interest and drift away to other interests. The little information we get is piecemeal and politicized to the point where it’s almost useless. And in the meantime, we lose 94% of our monarch butterflies, and no one even knows it.
We all have the power to do something
And now here’s the magic of this book: Tallamy gives us permission to save nature ourselves. He proposes we form a “Homegrown National Park,” as he calls it, a web of little natural areas, maybe as small as a few plants in containers, that give pollinators the plants they need to eat and reproduce and do the jobs we depend on to keep human life going on Earth. Each patch is small but entirely within reach, and together, they form a mighty solution to save nature.
This isn’t just busy work to keep the peasants happy, either. In fact, he argues that small is better. Pollinators can only fly so far, and the vast swaths of pollinator deserts like sterile lawns and parking lots are as big a threat to bees and butterflies as any pesticide. It’s within our control to build little oases in our yards (microprairies!) and on our decks and balconies where we can invite nature in and give it a helping hand, providing food and a place to lay their eggs and raise more bees and butterflies.
And birds. If we want birds around, we need to allow some space for the caterpillars and other insects they need to feed their young and themselves.
It may not seem like much, Tallamy says, each little piece by itself, but all these little pieces add up to one big network and one big impact, connecting nature and connecting us.